“Houston, we have contact”
A sentiment I’ve seen often is that the sensation of touch is primarily negative in it’s connotations, and to a certain extent, I agree. Sight, smell, hearing, and taste are all ways for our body to detect food or something else we might want to obtain. Touch, on the other hand, is our way of assessing bodily harm – it helps us ensure that every organ and body part is exactly where it’s supposed to be, and if it isn’t, make it loud and clear that we need to get fixed up. Touch wasn’t always like this – in fact, touch was a key sense in the detection of food during our earliest steps in evolution. Vertebrates and invertebrates alike developed stalky antennae to feel for prey beneath the sand of primordial oceans, and to a lesser extent detect the body heat emitted by other organisms. However, as we left the water and later developed into our bipedal selves, our connection to the Earth thinned, and now we associate touch much more with pain responses than we do with the acquiring o...